LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 173 



way. A man may very properly have his door-yard 

 and garden curvatures upon a plane surface, if they 

 be accounted for by judicious planting. I have even 

 seen little hillocks thrown up upon a two-acre patch 

 of adroitly arranged pleasure-ground which suggested 

 agreeably larger and more graceful hillocks near by 

 that were not attainable. But a man who should 

 undertake the building of a considerable hill in a 

 level country to relieve the monotony, would very 

 likely have his labor for his pains. Even the great 

 tumulus upon the field of Waterloo, upon which the 

 Belgian lion snuffs the air, had to me always a most 

 absurd look of impropriety. A group of white head- 

 stones or a column of marble would have told more 

 gracefully the story of the Belgian dead. The stu- 

 pendous rock-work at Chatsworth, again, always ap- 

 peared to me a most monstrous waste of good honest 

 material and honest labor. It is very costly and 

 expensive ; but one of the least of God's cliffs would 

 overshadow it utterly. Its artificiality cannot cheat 

 one who knows what rocks are in the fissures of the 

 hills ; and he looks upon it, at best, with the same 

 sort of foolish wonderment with which he looks upon 

 the wooden puppets in the Dutch gardens of Broek. 



Thus much I have written to show, so far as I 

 might, that the small landholder can avail himself 

 of the laws of the best landscape art, and in virtue 



